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Balance

This one’s counter-intuitive and will rub super-striving workaholics the wrong way: Maintain some semblance of a life-work balance. How to measure the impact on your productivity? Count your sick days (they will drop). Unless I’m feeling physically, spiritually, emotionally balanced, I’m dead in the water. Work out, spend time with family, go to church, make love. You’ll be more productive when faced with a stressful deadline or an unhappy client. --- Paul Jankowski, Founder, Access Brand Strategies

Decisiveness

My key to productivity is simply “make a decision.” Even a bad decision is recoverable, and better than no decision, since it gets the issue off your plate and moving. Making no decision bottlenecks your work, and causes things to happen to you, rather than by you. --- Marty Zwilling, founder and CEO, Startup Professionals

Routine

Every morning I spend an hour reviewing all of my RSS feeds using Google Reader and then bookmark the most important articles that relate to my industry using Delicious. This routine gives me a selection of content that I can share throughout the day on social networks. It also serves as a database that I can pull from for use in my keynote presentations, books, articles and magazines. Although this routine takes an hour out of my day, it saves me countless hours in the future. --- Dan Schawbel, Managing Partner, Millennial Branding

Clear Line Of Sight

David Tighe, a time-management pro, gave me a tip that doubles my daily productivity if I stick to it: Create an “A Space” in your work area. This means:

-No material comes into that space except the work of the moment.

-All other projects and folders are moved out of my line of sight.

-All personal memorabilia is positioned out of sight.

-I have an uninteresting computer screen graphic.

-I turn off e-mail inbox alerts.

-I make hour-long appointments with projects, and keep them.

-When done, I move that material off my physical and computer desktop, clearing the way for the next project to move in and get my undivided attention.

Now if I could just get myself to stick to it. --- Kern Lewis, Founder, GrowthFocus